New Logo for the Delhi BRICS Summit May Look Familiar

In 2010, there was huge hype around the public competition to design a new symbol for the rupee. Not to be outdone, the Ministry of External Affairs organized a public competition to come up with a logo to mark India’s hosting of its first – and the fourth overall – summit of the BRICS countries that is scheduled to take place in New Delhi at the end of March.

For those who have somehow managed to avoid possibly the world’s most overused and annoying geopolitical acronym, BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and Southafrica. Yes, we know that’s not how South Africa is spelled, but otherwise it would be BRICSA.

The winner of the logo competition, announced Friday, was Sonesh Jain, a 20-year-old architecture student from Gwalior who studies at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee in Uttarakhand. He says the promised award is 50,000 rupees.

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Mr. Jain’s logo comprises of a stylized peacock with different colored feathers. The MEA said in a release that the “winning entry cleverly blended a symbolic representation of a peacock, with colors suggesting renewal and resurgence.”

Mr. Jain said in a telephone interview that he was inspired by the peacock because it is a quintessentially Indian bird. He also once read a poem about when a peacock dances, the colors of its feathers glitter in the sky.

He opted for a circular design because he felt it was a) Indian and b) would allow each of the five feathers (for five countries) to be apportioned equal size and importance, he said.

CNBC LLC.

If the idea of a colored-feather stylized peacock logo looks and sounds familiar, you may have been watching too much CNBC. Its logo – and that of its U.S. parent company NBC – is, wait for it, a colored-feather stylized peacock.

Mr. Jain noted that some of his classmates had remarked on what they perceived as a similarity between his logo and the broadcaster’s. But, he says, “I can definitely prove that this logo is totally different.”

The key differentiators, according to Mr. Jain:

–The CNBC peacock’s feathers are rounded and wider at the top than the bottom. The BRICS summit logo feathers are roughly the same width at the top and bottom but swell in the middle.

–The CNBC peacock has six feathers. The BRICS summit peacock has five.

–The wings on the CNBC peacock are solid; the wings on the BRICS summit peacock contain two smaller feathers; they also overlap while CNBC’s are separate.

A spokesman for the MEA said the jury considered the similarities between the two logos but decided that there were “distinct differences” that made them sufficiently differentiated to pick Mr. Jain’s out of more than 100 submitted. He noted some of the same differences as Mr. Jain and added another: the BRICS summit logo looks a little like a lotus flower, too.

We’ll let readers decide: is this BRICS summit logo too close for comfort to CNBC’s or is the world big enough for two logos derived from the same bird with similarly-colored feathers? Let us know in the Comments.

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